On Saturday, Nov. 3, the Pioneer Press published an editorial on our Opinion Page whose subject was a proposed amendment to Minnesota’s constitution that would define marriage as only between a man and a woman and create another barrier to same-sex marriage.

In that editorial, keeping with our Opinion Page decision this year to not endorse candidates or to recommend a yes or no vote on the amendments, we wrote: “Minnesotans will decide how to vote on this issue. As has been the case with legislative races and the Voter ID amendment, the Pioneer Press is not endorsing one way or another.”

But the piece was widely read as favoring the amendment, and many people considered our “not endorsing one way or another” line to be disingenuous at best. Clearly, we failed to deliver what we had meant to. And it’s easy enough to see why people read the editorial as favoring the arguments for the amendment.

The primary arguments against the amendment are clear and compelling: The Constitution is not the place for legislating marriage; and same-sex partners should have the same opportunity to profess their loving commitment, and gain the advantages of its recognition by the state, as heterosexual couples do, and for the same reasons.

Some of the arguments for the amendment are complicated. In the context of the broader, longer-term discussion of how we define marriage, we thought it useful to give weight to those arguments. The premise of that approach, as well as how we executed it in Saturday’s editorial, is arguable.

In any case, we should have been more direct about the premise, and we should have made our respect for the anti-amendment arguments more evident.

A word about the difference between our Opinion Page and our newsroom: No journalists from the newsroom, other than me, have anything to do with the editorial opinion of the Pioneer Press. The mission of the people in our newsroom is to report the news from our communities fairly and impartially, and they are committed to that mission.

— Mike Burbach, editor, St. Paul Pioneer Press

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